


Carry You (to Peaceful Fields)

by Ange_de_la_Mort



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, Love Confessions, M/M, Mission Fic, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29246844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ange_de_la_Mort/pseuds/Ange_de_la_Mort
Summary: During the events of "Across the Universe", Keith and an injured Shiro get abducted by cannibalistic alien ants who want to have them for dinner. Thankfully, Keith can actually cook to save his life...
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13
Collections: Sheith Cookbook





	Carry You (to Peaceful Fields)

**Author's Note:**

> For the [Sheith cookbook zine](https://twitter.com/sheithcookbook). I hadn't written Voltron in a while, so I was very happy about and grateful for the opportunity.

Keith's hand practically slams down on the button that operates the exit hatch. Without losing even a second, he springs to his feet and hurries down the ramp, almost stumbling—not that he would mind. This is not about him, not about looking superior and competent in front of one of his old classmates.

This is about Shiro.

Just like he's always about Shiro.

After a few quick steps he comes to a skidding halt next to Shiro, who is still sitting on the floor and pressing a hand on the wound at his side, whose gaze is following the last of the strange creatures (Wolves? Lizards? Some weird crossbreed of both?) almost as if he wants to make sure that they really piss off, that Black has really frightened them so much that they leave for good.

Shiro's name is already on the tip of his tongue, and he automatically extends a hand to make sure he's okay...given the circumstances. _Found you_ , wants to come over his lips. _Got you_ , he wants to say, smiling at him, showing him that he'll never leave him again (never let him go again). At least not voluntarily, not without following him to the end of the universe and, if necessary, grabbing him by the hair and dragging him back home ('home' in this case is a paraphrase for 'to Keith', which he himself doesn't dare to say out loud yet). _I'm here. I'm right here._

Instead, he forces himself to laugh, one that he worries sounds false even to his own ears. "Didn't know you could be such a trouble magnet."

Only now does Shiro look up to him. His forehead is covered with sweat. It's obvious he's in pain. And yet he doesn't say a word about it (swallowing his own problems to take care of others as he has always done—as Keith has seen time and time again), but manages to curl his lips into a wobbly smile. "I kinda stole your spot in the limelight, didn't I?"

"Yeah." Keith forces himself to smile as well. "But it's okay. I'm almost getting used to saving you."

He shouldn't have said that, for Shiro immediately becomes serious again. Immediately every hint of good humour—played or not—disappears, and he directs his gaze again to the barren mountain landscape in which they have landed. "What's your status?" he asks.

Neither of them can handle a fake retreat and ambush right now, Keith knows that. Not on an alien planet that could have all kinds of unknown dangers. Not in Shiro's condition.

That's why it's not difficult for him to automatically stand a little bit straighter and summarize his overall situation (and all their general problems): "I'm fine," he says curtly. "But my Lion is offline. No response at all. We'd need to recharge Red in the Castle, but we can't just leave him here to look for it 'cause have no idea if we can find this planet again."

"Even if we left this planet, we wouldn't know where we are and where to look for the others." Shiro slowly rises to his feet in an almost sluggish movement and grits his teeth. Keith wants to support him, wants to put his arms around him and help him, but he doesn't know if Shiro would be offended by it. In the past, he wouldn't have hesitated, but now, after all Shiro has been through, Keith isn't sure if he even wants to be touched without explicit consent...so he chooses not to touch him at all. Even these few movements seem to push his limits. “Our best bet is to stay inside Black and keep signaling our coordinates over the usual frequency we use to communicate with the Castle. They’ll have to find us eventually.”

“If they aren’t in a similar situation to us.”

“Yes. _If_.”

Keith shakes his head with a sigh. “I don’t like this. You’re hurt! We need to treat your wound as soon as possible. We don’t have time to waste by sitting around and waiting!” And hoping. Hoping that the others are okay. Hoping that whatever kind of magic or technology Haggar has used on them all to open this rift hasn’t scattered them all across the universe…or worse. 

Keith presses his lips together and swallows around a lump in his throat. He doesn't even want to imagine that something may have happened to the others, and yet the thoughts come unbidden—small, spiteful voices whispering in his head, telling him that he has been left alone once more, abandoned by everyone he's known. That this time, no one is coming to help him out of an unfortunate dilemma, because _Shiro_ , wonderful Shiro, can't help him now.

This time, it’s Keith’s job to help, to protect and save him and shield him from all harm just like Shiro has done so often for him. He looks at Shiro for a long moment and then says without hesitation: “I had to cross a canyon to get to your position, and I think I saw some smoke from somewhere down there. Maybe there’s a colony, or a village, where we can patch you up.”

He can see that Shiro isn’t all that thrilled about the suggestion, that he obviously thinks it's best to just get back into the Lion and wait, but since he's hurt, he has no choice but to trust Keith. Besides, _waiting_ has never really been Keith's thing. Let's face it: Keith has done pretty well so far, right? As a Paladin? Hasn't made too many mistakes, hasn't put any of them in more danger than necessary. Somehow he's getting the Paladin job done pretty well, right?… _Right?_ In any case, not trusting Keith would be out of character for Shiro. Already, he just shoots a tired glance and nods, reaching out so that Keith can help him up while he still presses a hand onto the wound at his side.

An exhausted sound comes over his lips, almost as if he’d want to groan in pain while lacking the strength to do so. He lets himself sink heavily against Keith’s body as he takes them both back inside his— _Shiro's_ —Lion and helps him to sit down in the pilot's seat, while Keith presses some buttons on the console in order to try contacting the others. It's all in vain, of course. Finally, Shiro slowly shakes his head and lets his shoulders sag, forcing himself to smile. "Okay. Guess you were right. We have no signal." 

Keith doesn't want to say he told him so, so he just shrugs. "Well. Guess we're gonna do things my way now."

" _Things_ ," Shiro repeats softly and laughs, then grimaces in pain because laughing is probably a very, _very_ shitty idea. "Things, he says.”

"What's so funny?”

"Didn't know I was _things_.”

Hastily, Keith averts his eyes, happy to be still wearing his helmet that manages to hide the heat creeping up his neck and cheeks, and at the same time also happy that Shiro has kept his sense of humor, no matter how awful it may be.

“Your jokes have seen better days.”

“Guess that witch didn’t just hit my side, but also my funny bone.”

“Okay, yeah, either that or you’re getting delirious. I think we gotta look for a place to treat your wound.”

This time, thankfully, even Shiro is smart enough not to joke about it.

_

Keith has to admit that flying a Lion while standing is a whole new experience: he has to hold on to the controls tighter, has to keep his legs firmly pressed to the ground in order to keep his balance so that none of the maneuvers throw him off his feet. He has to fly slower to make sure he doesn’t slip up, otherwise they might collide with one of the high cliffs, and that would definitely ruin his entire week for sure. But, well, no time to whine now.That’s just the way it has to be, because the other two options left would have been to either ban Shiro from the pilot's seat, which is so not gonna happen—Shiro looks so exhausted by now that Keith is afraid he wouldn’t be able to stand on his own legs even without some daring flying maneuvers—or to sit on Shiro's lap, which would open another can of worms entirely, so it’s a good thing that that is nothing more but a dumb little fantasy that Keith sometimes indulges in and that he’s probably never going to mention to Shiro. Not now at least. Maybe some other day. When Shiro's better and Keith doesn't have the chance to get into a battle with a horde of Galra to avoid having to talk about his feelings.

It's not long before they arrive at the spot where Keith had seen smoke rise before, so he makes Black land and looks over his shoulder at Shiro. "I'll check it out first, okay?" _So you don't have to move because I'm not blind, Shiro, I can see you're barely conscious, and I'm not gonna let you die out here, you get that, you idiot?_ "I'll be back in a minute," he adds, squeezing Shiro's shoulder, leaving his hand there a moment longer than necessary before he finally gathers the courage to leave him alone.

Just for a moment.

Promise.

_

Down in the canyon, the view is as desolate as on the rest of the planet. There’s basically nothing of colour, of radiance or vibrance. Everything is monochrome and monotone; just like it’s...yes, like everything is devoid of life. But the smoke has to come from somewhere, right? And smoke means chimneys and chimneys mean a village, right?

Keith looks from left to right and back again, and slowly makes his way to what he hopes might be this hypothetical village.

He doesn't get too far. Because something is drawing closer.

At first, it looks like water—like a black, viscous liquid that's rushing towards him, trying to fill this canyon that looked as dried out as the rest of their surroundings. But before Keith even manages to turn around and run back to Shiro and his Lion, he realizes that it's no liquid. It’s _bodies_ . A pulsating, black mass of bodies that inexorably move toward him, _flooding_ him, and pushing him into the ground until he can't breathe, until all air is forced out of his lungs.

Only with difficulty does he manage to lift his head far enough to see that they are not only throwing themselves at _him_ , but at Black as well, flooding into the open escape hatch...where Shiro is.

"No!" he yells even as they surround him, even as he tries to make his way through their massive, sturdy bodies back to Black. "Stay away from him! Don't you touch him!

Saving Shiro is the first thing on his mind when he sees them swarm the cockpit.

And when a saw blade-shaped claw grabs him around the helmet and hurls him against one of the rock walls face first, it's also his last thought before everything around him goes black.

_

He awakens to the sound of mandibles clicking. When he opens his eyes, his vision remains blurred, and it takes a few moments before he understands that the visor of his helmet is shattered. When he tries to raise his hand to take the helmet off, he notices that his hands are tied behind his back.

And then he remembers that his first, last and only thought should be to watch over Shiro, so he scrambles to his feet, looking around the tiny cell they shoved him in.

To his relief, he doesn't have to search for too long, because Shiro is lying next to him, hunched over, unconscious. With a soft curse on his lips, he slides towards him on his knees and gently nudges Shiro’s shoulder with his own. "Shiro?" he whispers. "Shiro, wake up!"

Shiro responds with an almost inaudible pained noise, and Keith curses again. _This isn't good_ , he thinks. _We need to get out of here._

A buzzing sound wakes him from his thoughts, and as he raises his gaze. (And now, for the first time, really notices the bars that separate their little cell from the rest of the, uh…anthill? Are they in a giant anthill? The bars are made of the same strange material as everything around them, anyway.) He stares directly into the disgusting compound eyes of a...giant ant. Or rather, two ants.

Keith would love to pinch himself now to make sure he's not just dreaming, but having seen even stranger things than six-foot-tall ants in the last few weeks, he fears nothing of this in a nightmare anyway.

"Hey!" he yells at them, staggering as he gets up again. "Hey! What do you think you're doing with us? Let us go!"

The two creatures respond with a language of clicking and buzzing sounds, and Keith groans in frustration. A thing that doesn’t speak his language can’t be negotiated with—all the more reason to get them both out of here.

"Don't you hear me?" he tries again. "I said: Let us go!"

The creatures are moving a little. It's barely visible unless one gives them a closer look (which he doesn't really want to, he gets sick at the sight of the huge scissor-like mandibles already without having any closer looks). They tense up and buzz more violently. At first Keith really thinks— _hopes_ —they understand him, or at least that him screaming at them might scare them off, but then he sees that something _else_ is making its way to their jail cell. And _that_...that thing is horrifying.

"An ant queen," Shiro, apparently the only one here who reacted to Keith yelling, whispers quietly.

"Yeah," Keith says, although he actually wants to say something else—something that involves a lot more swearing, a lot of disgusted sounds, maybe even a tiny, frightened whimper.

The queen is monstrous. At least twice as big as her underlings and also much wider. Each of her compound eyes is as big as Keith's head as she leans down to look at them through the bars. Her mandibles move, and to Keith's horror he can actually make out _words_ underneath the rumbling sound of what seems like rocks being put into a grinder: "...Fresh...meat..."

Oh, no. Oh no, no, no! 

"Wait!" Keith yells hoarsely and takes a step back, almost tripping over Shiro. "Wait. Don't eat us! I... I wanna make...a deal.” The queen stares at him out of unblinking crimson eyes, and Keith has to force himself to look at her. If they survive this, he'll have nightmares for the rest of his life. "Give me some time and ingredients, and we can cook you something better than human meat.”

" _We_ ," Shiro repeats, a raspy noise that almost sounds like laughter. "Someone sure is optimistic."

"Shut up, Shiro!" _I'm so sorry, Shiro, I'll never shout at you again when this is over, I promise, just please, please shut the hell up now._ "I mean it! _I_ can. I'm good at cooking. And I can teach you to do it yourself. Really! Look, just... _Please_."

He is not quite sure if the queen baring her mandibles is a sign of hunger or whether she smiles.

_

"You'll stay here," Keith says gently as they open the cell door for him. "I'll be back soon."

"Funny. The last time you said that, we ended up here."

Keith tenses up and shakes his head, sighing. "I know. I know, Shiro. But I'm gonna make it all okay. Promise."

"Keith..."

"Look, I... I know I disappointed you, but I promise. Okay?"

"That's not..." Shiro sits up slowly and swallows hard, swallows a sound of pain. "If we don't make it," he begins, then exhales shakily, "if _I_ don't make it, I need you to know—"

"That I have to lead them. I know. You told me a few times already, and I told you it's not gonna happen.” Before Shiro can argue with him about it, Keith gives him a thumbs-up and leaves.

_

"This is so disgusting," he mutters to himself. "I'm never gonna eat again in my entire _life_ ." If he has one after all of this. If he survives this. If he manages to take Shiro back to the Castle. But—after all these _ifs_ —then, yes, he's never going to be able to touch food without thinking of...this.

The lizard wolf growls at him through its muzzle and, really, he can't blame it at all. After all, he is the one putting his hands (ew) on the udders (ew!) of the creature and clumsily squeezing and pulling on them to milk it. He's been fighting monsters for weeks, he's been seeing blood and death and grime, but _this_ is what makes him want to cry. He keeps at it though until pale, grayish blue milk noisily splashes into the bucket that Keith has placed under the animal.

(Honestly, this is probably the first time he would have liked to switch with Lance. Had Lance been here now, this would have been just like a normal Tuesday for him, right? Because, well, he grew up on a farm, right? And a farm has cows, right? That can be milked. Keith is sure Lance could have done that without getting nauseous... On the other hand, would Lance even have been able to come up with a backup plan that fast?... Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. Credit where it's due and whatever, but better not think about Lance probably having the time of his life now while Keith himself is stuck milking lizard wolves and fearing for his and Shiro's life.)

So far everything has been pretty easy. He found out that the anthill is actually just a giant farm where the ants grow their food to protect it from the infinite _nothing_ on the planet's surface. Along with two of the ants (probably worker drones), he dug up several round things that seem to have roughly the consistency of potatoes, which along with other round things that _might_ be something like onions—albeit very strangely smelling onions—might even taste good. Perhaps... Hopefully... Because otherwise it won't be the onions and potatoes that are gonna be ant food.

In his mind, he ticks off his checklist. Potatoes, onions, all the herbs he could find, milk. He can use the milk to make cream, which is relatively easy (but would normally mean waiting for a night, and they don't have the time, so he'll just have to hope it works out), and maybe even butter...

With a faint sigh, he takes his hands off the udders, shaking them in disgust, and then, accompanied by the growl of the lizard thing, grabs the full bucket.

Okay, _now_ it will be revealed how much it has paid off to have lived alone in the desert for a year.

_

He doesn't want to call it stew. Nor does he want to say that it has become particularly _good_ . But it's _something_ that he's put together with a lot of hard work and effort.

And when he watches the queen gobble it all up, he thinks he didn't do such a bad job, considering the circumstances.

She makes a sound reminiscent of two millstones rubbing together, and he forces himself to smile. "Okay. And now I'm showing you what to do so your workers can make this for you as often as you want to."

_

"Hey, I'm getting a signal!" exclaims Keith, because checking on the others is the first thing he does after having carried Shiro back to Black, and hastily fuddles with the communicator’s controls to change the frequency. White noise comes out of the speaker in his helmet, chopped up scraps of words he can't quite understand, but he recognizes the voice—it's Pidge!

"Pidge? Pidge, do you copy?"

"-eith?"

"Yeah! Yeah, it's me!" Keith laughs, a sound that almost sounds like sobbing even to his own ears, because that’s just how relieved he is. "It's me, and Shiro is here, too!”

Again just noise, but eventually Pidge's voice is clearer. Her shout of happiness makes Keith flinch. "You guys have no idea how long we've been trying to get through to you."

"I can imagine.” He smiles and then shakes his head. "Hey, where are you? How quickly can you get to us?”

"I can see your position. I guess it's gonna take a few hours tops, but—"

"Pidge," he interrupts her urgently. "Shiro is _hurt_ , you need to come and get us _now_.”

What follows is a string of colourful curses and a bunch of words Pidge must have picked up on their shared travels, but then she tells them she'll be there soon. "Stay put, okay?”

"Okay,” he says, when all he can think is _please be quick, please be here on time, please don't fuck this up._

_

It takes a few attempts for the campfire to stay lit, but Keith won’t complain. At least they're safe now. Both of them. Well, as safe as they can be when they’re still stuck on a hostile planet and Keith’s friend, colleague, _partner_ is injured. Keith wants to hug him, tell him everything's going to be okay. That it won't be long until the others take them back to the Castle, until they can take care of his wound.

...But the last time he said everything was going to be okay, it all turned out freaking horrible (he still gets sick at the thought of milking giant lizard wolves). So he just stays silent and shuffles a little closer to Shiro and the fire, gently brushing his fingertips over Shiro’s arm.

"Guess we're gonna make it," Shiro says quietly and turns his head a little bit to look Keith in the eyes.

"Yeah." Keith laughs. "Yeah. So much for you trying to shove me into the leader role."

"...Keith.”

"I know," he says quickly and averts his eyes to stare into the fire. "Really. I know that was necessary. I get it. I'm just, you know...glad I don't have to."

"Keith.”

"Because I... I really couldn't bear the thought of losing you and—"

"Oh, for fuck's sake— _Keith_."

He flinches because he doesn't remember ever having heard Shiro swear. His head snaps back to look at him, at his tired, exhausted face, at the...tiniest hint of a smile? Uh. What?

"That wasn't what I wanted to say back then," Shiro admits gently, and when Keith looks at him confused and maybe a little bit overwhelmed, he slowly reaches out to take Keith's hand.

His mouth suddenly feels dry, and that’s not just because he hasn't drunk anything but lizard wolf milk for hours. He wants to say something; something wonderful, something clever, something that shows Shiro how surprised and overjoyed he is that they're both obviously two idiots sharing one brain cell, but all that comes over his lips is a soft, "Oh," that he's maybe even a little ashamed of, because it doesn't do justice to the almost effervescent source of _feelings_.

So he tries again: "...Oh."

...Crap. So much for that.

"Yeah," Shiro agrees and laughs softly.

More words aren’t even needed.

Because some time later, when Pidge arrives with her Lion to save them both, they are still sitting there, just like that, around the fire, shoulders touching. 

And Keith refuses to let go of Shiro's hand.


End file.
